Imagine what they could do with a piece of lint

British scientists use man-made DNA speck to store 739kB of digital data. This is one of the most exciting scientific breakthroughs I've read about in a long time.

The data stored in the test amounted to only 739 kilobytes, but the technique could be scaled up to store the three zettabytes, or 3,000 billion billion bytes, of stored data estimated to exist on earth, and the only limitation to wide implementation is the high cost of synthesising DNA, the researchers said. The world’s data would theoretically fit in one hand and could be stored safely for many centuries, they said.